RARE Handwritten Poems By TUPAC SHAKUR Released -

(Tupac artwork above by wildestdreamz)

“Before, during, and after interviews for the book I co-wrote about 2Pac and Biggie, I was given different reasons to explain his legacy,” Weiss writes. “Some said that he was the greatest rapper ever because he was the only one intellectually and stylistically rich enough to teach a college course on. Others couldn’t articulate it; they just pounded on their chest and said, Pac ‘hits me right here.’”

Images of the poems and several others were also published alongside an interview on Citizens of Humanity with Tupac’s first manager Leila Steinberg.

“I wanted to get the book published while he was still alive,” Steinberg said of The Rose that Grew from Concrete. “I’d been reading those poems in classroom workshops for years. I’d open an assembly to 2,000 kids by reading the Tupac poem ‘Lady Liberty Needs Glasses’ and have kids talk about what he meant by that. There are now classes at every Ivy League school on Tupac! Two hundred years from now when people want to understand what was happening in race, politics and music, they will study Tupac.” (hiphopdx)